Monday 8 June 2015

Tim Parkinson has composed some music and called it an opera and titled it Time With People. The title promises an experience in which the principles of opera are reduced to their fundamental concepts. The composer’s notes further that promise:

The resultant work (or opera) has arisen around the former notion of “no instruments”. The notion of “no music”. What is meant by “no music”, since arguably and obviously there are both? The notion is perhaps more one of absence. And that which may be revealed from out of this poverty. That which remains. Towards the reality of the situation. Of some time, with some people.

The means of using “no instruments” to make music show no great effort to disguise their structuralist organisational principles (cf. Parkinson’s collaborator James Saunders.) Amongst their other compositions, what distinguishes Time With People as an opera? For a start, there is a plot, one of intrigue, conflicting passions and reckless impulses. Certainly operatic, in a relative way, but this plot is told through the opera’s materials.

Traditions abound: repertoire (recorded snatches of Rossini and Handel start and end the piece), a chorus, even a ballet right when you’d expect it. The set is trash, a stage ankle-deep in random detritus: a dramaturg‘s sometime-fashionable relocation of events to a post-apocalyptic landscape. It’s too easy, it’s a cliche, and here the cliche is refuted. It turns out the trash is essential, as it is the orchestra of found objects, providing the accompaniment, and without it the opera could not exist. No instruments, but music.

Two people, sometimes silent, sometimes speaking, in turn or simultaneously, in response to audible cues. Their speech is clearly made of answers to questions we can’t hear. A nice, solid, structural process; but then it stops, and something else happens. The plot thickens: some other organisational force is at work, but we can’t tell what it is. Two pairs of drums are brought on stage – I thought there were no instruments? Things are getting dramatic; the purity of absolute music is sacrificed, made subservient to the demands of the plot, whatever it might be.

A drum-kit, two electric guitars, the chorus is equipped with headphones and alternately sing along or describe what they hear. It’s getting complicated, some aspects seem obvious while other motivations remain obscure. A mystery. By the end, two performers are intoning isolated words – “alone”, or “together” – to looped phrases of Handel. Found objects are collected and dropped, in order of descending size, diminuendo. The small words are redolent of a Romantic theme, but they’re as ambiguous as their relationship to that title. It remains unclear if this is an opera hollowed out into a shell, or recreated out of negligible scraps.

Time With People was performed by the edges ensemble under Philip Thomas’ direction. Hopefully it will appear again at the next LCMF.

Wednesday 3 June 2015

Another update on the work in progress that is Chain Of Ponds, a sequence of pieces I’ve been making using digital feedback. As discussed last time, the work is getting more refined. The underlying patchwork of circuits remains unchanged, but I keep modifying the script I’ve written which “composes” each performance. The script uses chance to determine which circuits are in use at any given moment, how they are tuned and configured, and how they may combine and interact with each other. Here’s a take of the script doing its thing.

There’s no editing, remixing or post-production in that recording. There is a potential maximum of 32 channels of sound in the circuit layout, but the audio output from the computer is stereo. This means that equalisation, levels and balance between speakers are all determined by the generating script. At the moment, I have no way to modify it. The conceptual purity of this situation is appealing, but aesthetic judgements of some sort are inevitable: I find myself either keeping or rejecting various takes.

It would be better to make these aesthetic decisions part of the performance process, so my next challenge is to find a way to interact – to some small but essential extent – with the myriad of potential sonic developments, in real time.